Friday, July 3, 2015

Assembling the MakerGear M2 3D Printer from Kit

Recently I purchased a MakerGear M2 3D printer and assembled it from kit. Here are pictures from various stages of my assembly as well as some post-assembly pictures. These may be useful to people researching 3D printers for purchase, or assembling their own MakerGear M2 printer.

All components of the kit arrived in a single box. Many components of the frame were already assembled. I particularly liked that most of the components were individually labeled. Hardware (screws, nuts, etc.) came in individually labeled bags, further packaged by their size (M6, M5, M4, etc.).

Shipped components:

Here are pictures of the various sub-assemblies I assembled from individual components. The pictures below represent the completed sub-assemblies.

Spider sub-assembly, which holds the build plate and heater.

Extruder mounting plate sub-assembly.

Fan sub-assembly.

X and Y motors with pulleys attached. Although I attached the pulleys at this point, I readjusted their heights during installation to the frame.

Idler bolt sub-assembly. I assembled two of these. Each belt (X and Y) passes through a motor pulley and an idler bolt.

Controller board and electronics enclosure. The main instructions pdf referred to a previous version of the electronics enclosure (laser-cut plastic version). There is a separate pdf for the metal enclosure assembly.

The following is the frame as it was shipped.

After installing the completed spider sub-assembly and motor.

After installing the extruder motor, extruder and fan sub-assembly.

Controller board installed to the frame.

Next steps include installing the wiring harnesses and the top of the enclosure box. I do not have pictures for steps of installing the wiring harnesses. However, here are some post-assembly pictures.

Completed 3D printer. The kit came with black PLA filament. The picture is taken with the blue third-party PLA filament I used.

Filament feeding tube.

Positioning of the Z-stop switch.

Z-stop screw for adjusting the Z-zero-height. Note that this screw is rather long. When you need to adjust the height you can turn the screw manually from bottom of the plate without lowering the plate.